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Friday, 30 October 2015

So I completely stole this recipe from the internet in general. So many people have posted it. BUT. They all posted it as a recipe for Magic Shell. And as we all know, it's actually called Ice Cap.

Here's how it's done...

Make Your Own Ice Cap
This recipe makes about 1 ¼ cups of Ice Cap. You can double it or triple it if you have a lot of kids... Or a sweet tooth.Ingredients:

½ cup cocoa powder

½ cup coconut oil

¼ cup honey (or double if you like it very sweet. I don't.)

Method:

Put a little bit of water in a small pot.

Put all of the ingredients into a small jug with a spout.

Put the jug in the pot. Voila! A double boiler that will be easy to pour out of later.

Put the pot on the heat. High, in case you were wondering.

Once it starts melting, stir continously until everything is nicely mixed together.

Once it's very smooth and super runny, turn the heat off. It should be ready before the water in the pot even starts boiling. If not, and the water starts simmering, turn the heat down. No need to get splashed with boiling water unnecessarily.

Pour the sauce out into a pretty bottle.

A Pretty Bottle!

I used an old olive oil bottle. The little pouring thing in the top is really useful for carefully pouring runny chocolate sauce...

Anyway, you can keep this in the cupboard for a while, or in the fridge for longer. Just heat it up over some warm water if it solidifies in the bottle.

And I bet you can't guess what I tested mine on. (Because this is the first time I've made it, by the way. Hence the required testing.)

No, that funny little brown thing isn't what you're sniggering about.

Yes, you figured it out! Half of a frozen banana! AND IT WORKED! :D

And, better than that, it tasted good. The sauce is quite bitter on its own, but when it's covering a sweet, frozen banana, it tastes great. So I'm quite chuffed.

Now go and try it yourself. It's much cheaper than buying the normal Ice Cap, and probably healthier, too, if you care about that.

Thursday, 29 October 2015

Yesterday was hot. And I mean HOT. It was at least 32°c and I was suffering to the point of intense grumpiness. Before I thought of taking a cool shower outside (which fixed my mood problem), I decided to make frozen smoothies.

It was quick and easy to put them together, because clever girl that I am, I had already frozen a bunch of bananas a few days before.

Before I get to the recipe, here's some back-story about the 'nanas:

Francois and I have REALLY been enjoying banana smoothies for the last little while. So much so, that we keep running out of bananas. I remembered reading about how well bananas freeze, so when we went to the shop on Monday, I bought eleven kilograms of almost-ripe narnars. Yes. Eleven.

This is what I haven't dealt with yet.

When we got home, I chopped up all of the mostly ripe ones and popped them in the freezer. I've been chopping some every day, as they ripen. All of this chopping resulted in a very full container of banana bits.

I've used a lot already, this was full to the brim!

Today, I realised that there's no way that all of the banana will fit in the containers that I have, so I also froze a few whole bananas on a tray.

I'll probably dip those in chocolate and freeze them for lollipop-like treats.

Anyway, the chopped, frozen banana slices were used to make scrummy-liscious fruitshake smoothies!

Ingredients:

3 Chopped frozen bananas

4 tablespoons rolled oats

1 heaped tablespoon honey

3 big tablespoons plain yoghurt

½ cup milk

2 shakes of cinnamon

Method:

Put oats, cinnamon, milk and yoghurt into a blender.

Blend until the oats become fairly fine. This shouldn't take more than a few seconds.

Add the honey and blend again.

Add the banana bits, half a banana at a time, blending before adding more. If you have a powerful blender, you can just chuck it all in at once.

Blend until smooth. Add more milk if it's too thick for your taste. (I like it thick, I eat it with a spoon!)

Pour into glasses. This recipe is for two big smoothies, but you can adjust it quite easily to stretch it, if you like.

I don't have a picture of them, but I'll try to remember to take one tomorrow when I make more. :P

In other news: I've started playing piano again!

I used to play when I was in primary school. That's a while ago, as I'm sure you can imagine, so my skills are rather lacking at the moment.

Francois brought my keyboard downstairs a few days ago after our landlord came to fetch his piano. Then Francois had a song stuck in his head from The Legend of Zelda (Saria's Song, to be specific) and he tried to work it out on the keyboard...

Monkey see, monkey do, and now I'm playing every day, working out tunes that play in my head, practicing scales and reminding myself of how to read sheet music.

It's bloody fun!

We've reorganized the furniture a bit so that I feel comfortable at my keyboard, and Francois has a better layout for playing games at his PC as a pleasant extra result.

This is my spot!

Now I don't play piano RIGHT next to the toilet! Yay!

And for any of you who may be interested to know, this is my keyboard:

It's a Technics KN 1200, just in case you can't read what's in the photo.

Anyway, that's it from me, for today.

Oh! I want to try to make banana ice-cream. But I need a stronger blender to do that. I think it'd be cool to make and sell dairy-free ice-cream to the locals.

Oh and one more thing. I've turned over a new leaf. My house is neat and tidy almost all the time, and I do dishes just about every day. It's pleasant to be home! Well. Downstairs, anyway. I still need to tackle upstairs...

Tuesday, 13 October 2015

I wanted to write a short post about this a while ago, and I completely forgot to do it. Last week (I think it was last week), Francois and I went to his mom's house to make pizza for supper. As you all know, I can't eat wheat. But I know a great wheat-full pizza base recipe, so I decided to try to adapt it.

The original recipe calls for a one-to-one ratio of self-raising flour and double thick plain yoghurt. You just mix it together and knead it until it's nice and puffy, adding lots of extra flour along the way. Then you roll it out super thin, add toppings and bake at a really high temperature. Tada!

Last time that we did it, they were super amazing and looked like this:

Knead it well while adding coconut flour as needed to dry it out, until you have a dough that resembles bread dough. Unfortunately, it won't spring back when you push it lightly with your finger, so don't knead it forever wondering when it'll happen. It won't.

Butter or spray a baking tray, and dust lightly with coconut flour.

Press the dough down onto the tray, making thin pizza bases.

Pop the plain base into the oven on a low shelf, and let it cook for about five minutes.

Pull it back out, cover with toppings, allow to cook for another ten minutes or longer... But keep an eye on things just in case it starts to burn.

You can grill it for a few minutes if you want crispy cheese.

Gently ease the crispy base off the tray with a butter knife.

Tada!

Yes, it was actually tastier than the original recipe. Super crunchy, but not too tough or chewey. We loved them! And we had loads of toppings so we made a few variations...

What class, what style...

And the best thing? Unlike other gluten-free nonsense, potato flour is very affordable. It was R30 for the bag, and we made five 20cm bases and were too full to make more, so I still have some dough wrapped in cling wrap in the fridge.

Monday, 12 October 2015

This morning after having tea, while Francois was designing a poster for his mum, I wandered out into the garden to enjoy the sunshine. That's when I noticed that these weed-like flowers were growing particularly abundantly on the lawn.

Very, very abundant flowers.

So ridiculously abundant!

As I stood there, staring at the many, many yellow flowers, I realized that I'd never made a daisy-chain before. Of course, these aren't daisies, but they were plentiful enough to fulfill the same purpose. So I went over to sit in the grass and I got to work.

Francois noticed that I'd been outside for quite a while, and peeked out at me twice, but didn't know what I was doing hunched over in the grass, until I excitedly came over to him, with a very silly smile on my face, and said: "Take a picture of me!" So he did.

First he took this one...

... And then this prettier one.

Plaiting flowers together is actually quite tricky. I had to be careful not to break the stems as I bent them, and they hurt my fingers every now and again because the stems are rather prickly, kind of thistle-ey. But it was worth it! Because pretty!

I posted those pictures up there on facebook, and Ben pointed out that they're dead. Cute, but dead. So when Francois and I decided to do a (very) short hike, I brought my death-chain with me. This is what they looked like before we left:

Look! They're mostly alive!That's different to mostly dead, by the way.

They were starting to wilt, but still looked pretty. I wrapped them around my wrist, and we headed off in search of a waterfall. It wouldn't be a very difficult search, because we already knew exactly where to find the waterfall.

We crossed streams, and climbed hills, and strolled along pretty paths... And I did all of this with some flowery death around my wrist.

If you would direct your attention to the picture on the right, you'll notice the yellow wreath of death. It's small, I know... But that doesn't make it any less full of death.

During our easy search, I managed to slip on a wobbly rock while crossing the stream. My boot got all filled up with water, which I'm sure you all know isn't particularly pleasant.

Anyway, I'll wrap up this silly post with these three pictures:

We found the waterfall! So 'S' is for Success!

Notice the much darker left boot...

'S' is for Soaked?

While sitting on a rock, looking at the waterfall and eating peanuts and raisins, my death wreath fell apart... So I decided to give it a water burial.

But these flowers don't sink, and they landed like this.

So 'S' is for Silly!

P. S. Francois took all of the photos that actually look decent. Thank you, Francois!